


With Drooping Wings

by werebear



Series: Broken Wings [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Drunkenness, M/M, Podfic Available, The Fall - Freeform, Wing Grooming, Wingfic, heavy on the comfort or so i hope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 08:39:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19314580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/werebear/pseuds/werebear
Summary: One night, in the bookshop, they were particularly drunk for no particular reason. Crowley snapped their wine glasses full, yet again, and slurred, apropos of nothing: “I was ‘fraid of heights for a while. Not the heights exactly… th’wind.”(Or, a headcanon that turned into a wingfic.)





	With Drooping Wings

**Author's Note:**

> Set some time before the birth of the Antichrist? I'm real new to the fandom, so it's probably a mix of show canon + a little book canon + ???
> 
> Title from Henry Purcell.

One night, in the bookshop, they were particularly drunk for no particular reason. Crowley was sprawled across a worn couch near the back (formerly a loveseat, but the more often Crowley sprawled there, the more Aziraphale surreptitiously lengthened it, just a bit at a time, to make it more comfortable for him), while Aziraphale was curled up in his favorite armchair. He wore his favorite dressing gown, warm and worn, over his shirt and waistcoat, while Crowley had shed his leather jacket like a cast-off skin.

That night, Crowley snapped their wine glasses full, yet again, and slurred, apropos of nothing: “I was ‘fraid of heights for a while. Not the heights exactly… th’wind.”

“What?” This happened. Crowley’s mind did leap about at times, especially on lengthening autumn nights at the shop, soft yellow lamplight and the shadows of the shelves all around them, and a table full of open bottles under the window. And Aziraphale was fairly certain that the demon was several of those bottles ahead of him tonight.

“The wind, wind. Even after my wings h-healed.” He gestured, drunkenly, with both wings and arms, stirring the air around them, and then ran a finger down his extended primaries. (Aziraphale was rather too fond of Crowley’s wings; so sleek, always so well-groomed. Had been ever since he’d first seen them, and that was ages and ages back. It was probably good he didn’t see them that often, but this was a let-your-wings-down kind of night; his own were wrapped around him, fluffy and ruffled and nest-like.) “Took forever before I tried flying again.”

Aziraphale frowned, attempting concentration. “You—”

“Because the wind,” Crowley said, overenunciating. “Wind on your face, in your hair.” He shuddered, dramatically.

Distracted from the question of _wings_ and _healing,_ Aziraphale said, “I thought that was your favorite part of flying.” He was certain they’d had that conversation at some point.

“Sure, sure, yeah. But y’know, for” he hiccuped, “an aeon or so, right after. Couldn’t stand it. Wind, clawing. If you’re falling fast enough, long enough, it feels just like dull blades, cutting into you, y’know?”

Oh. “Does it,” Aziraphale said, very faintly.

“Mmmhmmm.” Aziraphale thought he might nod off at that point, but instead Crowley roused and stretched out a dark wing and peered at it. “Lucky, though,” he said, sipping his wine, still looking at his wing.

“Lucky?”

“Mmm.” Crowley looked bleary-eyed but intent, turning the radiale of his wing, like a wrist with a fine jeweled watch on it to admire the sparkle. “Healed clean. One demon I know, nasty fellow, his are still crooked, to this day. Shame. Not that there’s many flight opportunities in his part of Hell anyway, but still.”

Aziraphale didn’t… he didn’t want to know the answer, it was too awful, but he wasn’t sober enough not to ask: “I’m sorry about your, uh, friend. Do… do they do a lot of,” he swallowed, “of wing-breaking? Down there?”

Crowley was quiet for so long, Aziraphale might have thought he had fallen asleep, except that when he glanced over he saw those yellow serpentine eyes were even more inscrutable than usual: weirdly bright, watching. “Yes,” Crowley said, slowly, “but this was from the first time. From the casting out.”

“From…”

Crowley looked away, shut his eyes, shrugged and pulled his wings in, a little too tightly to be casual. “How else would we all fall for so long?” He drained his glass, quickly.

Aziraphale felt the wine sloshing in his own stomach, and he stopped and focused, transmuting his wine glass into a mug of cocoa, to distract his body from the wanting to be sick. He’d heard… rumors. But he’d wanted to think they were just demonic lies, exaggeration. He’d heard. He’d heard that they’d—they’d _broken their wings_ before they’d expelled them, and he didn’t know if it was all at once, at the snap of a finger, or if Uriel and Sandalphon and the rest had gone through and done it one by one, or, or— He hadn’t been present for the casting out itself. A third, a whole _third_ of the Host… it had made him heartsick, even back then, even if they had… Surely it wasn’t really true, surely it wasn’t—

He pulled his own wings closer, but it didn’t make him feel better. He didn’t want to know this now, didn’t want to think about it. He feared he was more of a coward these days, not less. And Crowley, _Crowley_ , his… friend. Aziraphale wanted to reach out, to pull him in, to touch those dark feathers… He clenched his hands around his mug.

Crowley was turning away, anyway, his wings wrapped around himself. “Don’t want to talk anymore,” he muttered, scooting down and settling on the couch. “Sleep is good. Great invention, sleep.” 

“Yes, my dear,” said Aziraphale, and he couldn’t quite smile just now, but he also couldn’t stop his voice from softening unbearably. “But, ah, don’t you think you should sober up first?”

But Crowley was already snoring.

 

**

 

Aziraphale sobered himself up, most of the way, and then covered Crowley with an old afghan (Crowley would have been appalled if he were awake: it was a hideous orange and yellow and olive green pattern, made of cheap synthetic wool; Aziraphale had found it in a charity shop and every stitch had smelled so strongly of pure love—still did—that he couldn’t resist, in spite of the raveling corner and the scratchiness) before he retired to read in an armchair around a corner of shelving. Not his favorite spot, but far enough away that the light of the small lamp next to it wouldn’t be a bother.

It was late, past mid-night, and there was a barely waning moon out, still bright enough to cast light and shadow through the farther corners of the shop. He could feel the autumn chill outside, and he automatically took a moment to cast his awareness a little further, feeling the purr of the city, the distant vibration of humans still talking and thinking and arguing and fighting and loving and sleeping and choosing, choosing, choosing. He closed his eyes: there was an elderly homeless man and his dog, settling in a doorway three buildings down, and a group of friends walking past. Aziraphale could feel one of them, seeing the man, thinking of stopping; he very softly (so, so softly—free will was _such_ a delicate thing) nudged.

The human stopped. _Hi, I like your dog,_ they said. _You two all right here tonight?_

Aziraphale opened his eyes and smiled a little.

He looked down at the open book in his lap, something large and old, not entirely recalling what it was. He heard the squeak of the couch—Crowley turning over, snorting, settling down again.

Crowley.

_(Surely it wasn’t really true, surely it wasn’t—)_

Aziraphale stroked the wide margins of the yellowing pages, and tried to think about illustrating manuscripts, back in the day. He remembered giggling over some of the surreal pictures the humans came up with, and wondered where he’d put his silverpoint stylus and paints. It was so difficult to find proper parchment these days.

Crowley was still restless, turning again, though his snoring breath continued. Maybe the light was disruptive after all? Aziraphale could retreat to the flat upstairs, and his seldom-used bedroom there, but he… didn’t really want to leave Crowley alone.

 _Shouldn’t leave a demon unattended in the shop,_ he thought, half-heartedly, rationalizing pathetically. _Shouldn’t have a demon here at all, you idiot,_ but that thread of guilt was so worn with overuse that it barely registered anymore, most days.

 _Shouldn’t be caring about the quality of a demon’s sleep._ Now that was a bit sharper, and more difficult. He could argue back that it was his job, as an angel, to care about every one of God’s creations, even the Fallen ones. Maybe especially the Fallen ones. That argument certainly wouldn’t get him far with Gabriel or Michael, though. ( _Though maybe that’s all the more reason to make it,_ his heart whispered.)

And it felt uncomfortably hollow tonight. ( _Surely it wasn’t, surely—_ ) In the past, he’d so often thought, and said, other things. He’d assumed for a shamefully long time that it was utterly impossible for demons to love, or to do anything like unto it. Certainly his infrequent encounters with most demons had never seemed to indicate otherwise. (They smelled so distressing—reeking of hate, of cruelty, of schadenfreude, of despair—worst of all, of emptiness, a void where their angelic core should be.)

But he couldn’t deny that Crowley had always, always smelled a little… different. Since, well, since almost the beginning, since the Garden even, if he thought about it (remembering the first rain starting to fall, remembering that little shuffle closer, remembering lifting his left wing, instinctively). It wasn’t that Crowley didn’t smell like a demon, only that… he smelled like something else as well.

Aziraphale had always assumed that oddness was a natural result of spending so much time on this strange, wild mortal plane. But now he wondered… if he should wonder. He wondered what would happen if other demons spent more time on Earth, if… he wondered if something specific had happened to Crowley, over the centuries, he wondered…

Aziraphale shook his head. He’d always maintained that it wasn’t his place to ask questions, was it. He tried to trust, to have faith, to endure. He knew, and occasionally even admitted, that he wasn’t much of an angel, a great and mighty principality. He was soft, and frequently gluttonous, and slothful, and probably a coward—but he tried to trust, and he tried to love. Surely God knew that he tried.

Maybe all this was the inevitable consequence of too much time spent around the Snake of the Garden and his infuriating questions. That was… almost certainly true, and should probably concern him more than it did. And yet.

 Aziraphale sighed. _You’re really not getting much reading done,_ he was thinking, absently, when he heard a terrible, small sound from the direction of the couch.

Aziraphale was on his feet immediately, not even bothering with a bookmark. “Crowley?” he said, slipping back around the corner.

Crowley was, as usual, reclined at a frankly incredible angle—twisted around, shoulders hunched, one arm over his face. His wings were wrapped and crumpled around him. Aziraphale knew perfectly well that their wings were, under normal circumstances, flexible in the extreme, but it was still unnerving, given the conversation of the evening. Crowley was like a human toddler when he slept—given to the oddest contortions, and yet somehow never appearing to awaken stiff or sore in the least. Which made sense, Aziraphale supposed, given the givens, but it was still odd to see. And who knew what the rules were for a demon who actually liked sleep.

Right now, Crowley did not appear to be enjoying his sleep. He was twitching very slightly, tangled up, and there, again, he made a small, miserable sound. Was this—was he _really_ —

Angels (and demons) weren’t supposed to be able to have nightmares. Or dreams at all for that matter, though it was a less than common question because so few of them were interested in sleep at all. He himself found it tedious. But Aziraphale had delivered enough dream messages (and soothed enough nightmares along the way) to know the signs, he would have said… This was a discovery, really.

Crowley made a suppressed moan that felt— it was among the most dreadful things Aziraphale had ever heard. That was an absurd thing to even think, but he still stepped closer and said, louder, “Crowley. Crowley, dear, wake up.”

Crowley lurched, and then lunged. Or attempted to. He managed to get to his feet, but the afghan and his wings were tangled around him, and he nearly tripped. Aziraphale stepped in quickly enough to catch him by the elbows and keep him upright. For a moment, Crowley’s eyes were blank and golden, and didn’t seem to recognize anything; for less than a moment, Aziraphale thought Crowley might try to fight him, which would be the first time in, well, centuries. It passed though, and Crowley blinked, and then started twisting, looking over his shoulder frantically.

“It’s all right, it’s just the blanket, here, let me…” Aziraphale tried to disentangle him from the afghan, which was stretched net-like around him at this point.

Crowley was not cooperative. He was still trying to turn, almost like a dog chasing its tail. “I can’t—” he said, whined really, and flailed. 

“Oh, oh all right, here,” said Aziraphale, slightly cross, and snapped, sending the afghan up to his bedroom. Hopefully. It had rather been a favorite, but—

Freed from the entrapment of yarn, Crowley did not seem relieved. “I can’t see—” He spun around and one half-extended wing collapsed a pile of books, then struck the wine glass on the side table and sent it spinning and shattering to the floor, which only made him jump again. “I can’t—” His voice was panicky.

“Crowley—”

It was as if he finally recognized him, if nothing else. Crowley grabbed at Aziraphale’s sleeves. “Angel,” he said, in a wretched tone, “please.”

“My dear.” It was such a _very_ wretched tone that it was making Aziraphale quite profligate with the endearments, but it couldn’t be helped. “My dear, what is it?”

“I can’t—I can’t tell properly,” he said, craning his neck, and ahh, he was clearly still inebriated. But also dreadfully unhappy. “Please, can you—will you check them, I can’t—”

“Shh… sit down, dear,” Aziraphale said, easing him to sit on the ottoman in front of the couch, hoping to calm him. It was out of the question, of course: _wing touching_ was, well… not truly analogous to humans and sex (or at least, it needn’t be), but it was still terrifically intimate. And it was late, and Crowley was still intoxicated, and bleary with sleep besides. Aziraphale couldn’t possibly take advantage of him like this.

But Crowley bent over, putting his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and made another awful noise. “Angel, _please_ —” and Aziraphale was suddenly even more terrified that he might make the additional discovery that demons who had perhaps lived a little too long on Earth were able to _cry actual tears_ as well as to dream, and he did not feel equal at all to the task of coping with _that_ potential knowledge.

“Very well, very well,” he said, trying his best to sound businesslike but gentle, like the veterinarians he had spent a decade hanging about with once, after meeting that Wight fellow in Yorkshire in the 1930s. (Eventually he’d had to stop, because it made him too sad to heal suffering animals the slow way, only for the sake of show.) He sat down behind Crowley, on the couch. “I’ll check them over for you.”

Crowley made a sound which Aziraphale would, for his friend’s dignity’s sake, never have classified as a whimper, and curled over a little farther, and spread out his rustling wings.

They were certainly as lovely, up close, as Aziraphale could have recalled or hoped: sleek and dark, almost sharp looking (unlike Aziraphale’s own, which tended more toward downiness). They glittered in the late moonlight through the window: black, with sheens of blue and pearl and red. Some of the covert feathers were rather mussed, displaced from the tussle with the afghan, earlier, or perhaps tossing and turning on the couch.

“I’ll start with the left, shall I?” he said, or warned, quietly, and Crowley nodded, not looking up.

Aziraphale took a deep breath, and laid his hands on them, softly.

“I’ll begin here at the blade of the scapula,” he narrated quietly, because what else was there to do at this juncture? He felt the shoulder joint, very carefully, through and around the feathers to the shapes of the bones. “Down the humerus,” he went on, “up the radius, and here’s the ulna beneath.” He traced the thin skin between them, slowly, his voice lowering. “And here’s the metacarpals, and the phalanges.” He swallowed. “All perfectly sound.” Which was true. He hadn’t let his voice shake or his hands falter when he recognized the scars in the middle of the ulna and radius, the healed ridges of bone underneath, where the breaks had been. (Bad breaks, like someone had grabbed them and _wrenched_ , twisted, leaving open wounds behind…)

“Now the right,” he said, softly, almost a whisper. Crowley nodded again. His wings, and indeed, his entire body, seemed less twitchy than before.

Aziraphale returned to center. The back of Crowley’s neck there, bare and bent, was intolerable, and he looked away, quickly repeating the process on the other side, carefully tracing along the bones. Though not quickly enough to miss the matching scars, as well as one on the humerus. _Dear God,_ he thought, fervently, but he didn’t know how to continue that prayer, what he wanted to say, what he was even feeling.

“All sound,” Aziraphale said at last, and he couldn’t help drawing his hand across them, a final stroke. He could feel that the pads of his fingers had already altered themselves just slightly, for feather grooming. “Though your coverts are in a state,” he added, trying to sound neutral.

Crowley shifted his shoulders, his head still down. “You could fix that,” he said, very low.

If this were a normal moment, it would be the one where Aziraphale would laugh and say something along the lines of, ‘oh you serpent,’ or ‘foul tempter, working overtime again, hm?’ (It was normally over a more Earthly temptation—brunch, a rare wine, a new variety of pear. Not something so close to… everything they really were.) They’d played that moment hundreds, perhaps even thousands of times, over the years. He knew, by now, that Crowley was just teasing, that he didn’t really mean anything by it all.

But it wasn’t a normal moment, in the still, mostly dark, with dawn a bare hour away, and Crowley still tense and trembling from talk and dreams, with his neck bent and his wings drooping, and… Aziraphale didn’t have the heart for the joke.

Instead, Aziraphale said, “Very well,” attempting lightness, and he summoned up his (admittedly dusty) grooming kit: a small leather case with an assortment of grooming combs and a bottle of his own feather oil blend.

He fully expected Crowley to laugh at this. He could practically hear him now: ‘An oil _blend_? Don’t you take any pride in your appearance at all?’ Doubtless Crowley used only his own preen oil, fresh, but Aziraphale’s preen gland was awkwardly situated in this form (it varied from corporeal form to corporeal form), and, mutual grooming being not much encouraged in Heaven recently, and wings being in general immune to miraculous interference of most sorts, Aziraphale saved time by combining his own oil with some olive oil and scent and bottling it for convenience. A little went a long way, at any rate. And anyway (he was prepared to protest), he had better things to do than fuss over his wings constantly.

The expected mockery was not forthcoming, which really only worried Aziraphale more.

Aziraphale realized, belatedly, _he’s going to smell like me by the end of this,_ but it couldn’t be helped. He could apologize for that later. More importantly, in this case, Aziraphale certainly was not going to be _invasive_ , and he wasn’t going to go poking around where he hadn’t been invited, wherever exactly that might be, especially given the intoxication and the et cetera. Which left this.

Still. “Is this all right?” he asked. 

“Yeah, it’s fine, angel,” Crowley said, a little gruffly, but he seemed not entirely at ease.

“Crowley—”

He shrugged, rustling. “I’ve been up here a long time,” he said. He glanced back at Aziraphale and then shrugged again. “Nobody to help out for a while.”

“Ah,” said Aziraphale. “Yes. Well, same here, I’m afraid.”

Crowley cast a look at Aziraphale’s ever-ruffled wings, then at the dusty grooming case, and lifted an eyebrow. “Is that the story, then?” He was nearly smiling.

“Oh, hush,” said Aziraphale, and began, as politely as possible, to preen his demon’s feathers.

He didn’t get out the combs. He didn’t even bother to make a shoddy excuse in his mind regarding hygiene or anything else: it was only that he wanted to use his hands.

Aziraphale could honestly not remember the last time he’d been groomed by someone else. He could barely remember what it felt like, to do it, or to have it done; it was too long ago. It had been millennia, and besides, he saw things so differently now. Now… well. Now he knew he wanted to slide his fingers in among Crowley’s feathers and check and smooth every barbule. He wanted to ruffle them up, muss them a little, then tidy them again, perfectly… he wanted to press his face into them. He wanted to dig his hands in and _touch._ He wanted to be _impolite_.

He didn’t though, just carried on, fingers moving circumspectly. He closed his eyes in self-reproach. Gluttony, yet again. Not to mention—

And the way Crowley had slumped down now, even more boneless than usual—bent double over his knees, his wings relaxed and limp, letting Aziraphale turn and arrange them any way he pleased to get at the afterfeathers and quill shafts—could not be said to be helping matters in the least.

“Did you know,” Aziraphale said, at random, trying to distract himself, “that ‘preen’ in English is a variant of the word ‘prune’?”

“Ngffk,” said Crowley, into his knees.

“And one obsolete definition of, of that word meant… ‘anoint,’” Aziraphale continued, very softly, adding a little more oil to his fingers, stroking it on—over feather, over delicate bone, over scar tissue—so gently. Not to say with reverence. This distraction was really exceedingly ineffective.

“What?” Crowley asked vaguely, sounding drunk.

“Never mind,” Aziraphale sighed, and eased the last feather too tenderly into place. “All finished, my d- _ahem_.” He turned away and busied himself packing up the grooming case.

Crowley groaned and ran his hands through his hair, not even bothering to sit up.

“How are you feeling?”

“Still bit sloshed,” Crowley said, stretching, then watched as Aziraphale zipped the case and got up to put it on a nearby shelf. “Don’t want me to have a go, then?”

Aziraphale turned his back, fussing with the shelf. He is _drunk_ , he told himself, ferociously. He took a technically unnecessary, but steadying breath. “Perhaps another time, dear,” he said, lightly.

By the time he turned back around, Crowley was scrubbing at his sharp face with both hands. He looked a little tight and tense again already.

Overtired, Aziraphale thought. “My dear,” he said, “what about sobering up? Surely you’ll sleep better.” And not waking up with a hangover was certainly to be preferred, as he knew from personal experience. (He categorically refused to indulge any part of himself that wanted to think, _and after all, if you were sober_ _…)_

Crowley laughed, brittle. “Better not, supposing I want to sleep at all,” he said morosely, and rubbed at the back of his neck—an oddly human gesture, even on him. “I should go.” He made to stand up.

“Oh!” He shouldn’t say it, Aziraphale knew perfectly well, but— “Oh, please don’t.” He took a step closer, and somehow managed to refrain from blurting out, _what if you have another nightmare?_ Just— “Do stay.” He attempted a smile. “I promise not to wind you up in any more handicrafts.”

“Mm,” Crowley said, swaying slightly where he stood, looking halfway between sleep and suspicion.

Aziraphale thought of excuses, arguments, words. Instead he took a book and sat down at one end of the couch, very upright, flicked on the lamp, and looked up, speaking softly. “Please stay.”

Crowley blinked his amber eyes, very slowly, then nodded. He sidled over to the other end of the couch, then curled bonelessly down onto his side: wings around himself; hands pulled in to his chest; the top of his head just barely brushing Aziraphale’s leg. His hair was firey in the lamp light.

Aziraphale watched him sigh. Crowley smelled, as always, faintly of brimstone and smoke, and, right now, like Aziraphale’s wings as well. And also rather like the old afghan; the scent must have rubbed off on him.

Aziraphale stretched out his left wing, resting the edge on the back of the couch, so that the shadow lay cool and soothing over Crowley’s face. “Is this all right?”

Crowley’s eyes stayed closed. “Mmhmm, s’nice.”

Aziraphale smiled, tremulously, and opened the book in his lap. “Sleep well, my dear,” he murmured.

**Author's Note:**

> I looked up wing diagrams approximately 500 times during the writing of these 4000 words. 
> 
> If you would like to come talk about Michael Sheen's unbearable face and other matters, join me on my Good Omens sideblog: [ineffably-soft.tumblr.com](http://ineffably-soft.tumblr.com)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [With Drooping Wings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19946578) by [pinafortuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinafortuna/pseuds/pinafortuna)
  * [With Drooping Wings (Podfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20138416) by [BiP](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BiP/pseuds/BiP)




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